"Awkward," she said. "It would be very awkward."
"Muck up the auction," said Kip Cunningham. It wasn't a question, wasn't a statement, just a mumble. Absently he glanced toward his dressing cubicle where a white-haired black man was stooping slowly to gather his dirty clothes. "Maybe people won't find out," he added. The sneak's last hope.
"Kip, don't be an ass. True, not true, anybody who might conceivably be interested is going to hear about this by tomorrow."
There was a silence. The squash player looked across the locker room at a calendar near the pro shop window. It was a pin-up calendar of sorts, but instead of women as the objects of desire, each month had a different yacht. May had an elegant Concordia with tanbark sails, but Kip Cunningham wasn't looking at the boat. He was counting days until the Solstice Show, gauging how much time it would take for things to fall apart. "So how'll it play?"
His wife had turned her back on the window, on its mocking promise. "Depends," she said. "Best-case scenario, the rumor is false. Nothing has really changed, and this buzz about the artist's return just adds interest."
Oddly, disconnectedly, Kip Cunningham began to chuckle.
Claire Steiger could find nothing remotely humorous in what she'd said, and she imagined her husband must be party to some clownishness in the locker room. "Kip, if you can't even pay attention to what I say—"
"Oh," he interrupted, "I'm paying very close attention. You just said you hope that Augie Silver's dead."
The artist's dealer underwent a hellish moment of knowing she'd been caught, a moment as unsettling and humiliating as being discovered naked in a dream. She squirmed in her chair as though dodging thrown rocks, scrambled in her mind for some avenue of excuse, some route of escape. "I didn't say anything about Augie Silver," she protested, and her voice was thin and shrill. "I was only talking about the situation."
Kip Cunningham had not won much lately, not in business, not in squash, not in his marriage. He savored the event, let it fill his senses like wine, and when he answered, it was in the sweetly condescending tone of the victor. "But, my dear," he said, "Augie Silver is the situation."
*
The next day was a Tuesday, and just after ten o'clock in the morning Reuben the Cuban climbed the three porch steps of the widow Silver's house. The key he'd been given many months before was in his hand, but even though he knew that Mrs. Silver would not be home, would be working at her gallery, he knocked. It was the proper thing to do, not only for a housekeeper but for anyone approaching another's place. He knocked, he waited, and was just moving the key toward the lock when the door swung open.
Nina Silver stood before him, and even though she was smiling, Reuben was concerned that she was ill or freighted with that sadness that weighed people down like the muck around the mangroves, that made it so hard for them to move that they stayed in their houses, then in their rooms, and finally in their beds. With his eyes, he asked if she was all right.
By way of answer she grabbed him by his slender wrist and coaxed him across the threshold into the living room. "Reuben," she said, "something wonderful has happened. Mr. Silver has come back."
He looked at her, then past her shoulder at the blues and greens, the curves and edges of her husband's paintings. She did not seem crazy, but Reuben was afraid for her. Hadn't he served at the dead painter's memorial? Hadn't he heard the bald man with the deep voice give the eulogy?
"Come," the former widow said, and again she took his wrist. "I'll show you."
Reuben's feet did not want to move, it was as if they'd been replaced by wooden skids that scraped hotly across the floor. He dreaded the moment when he would stand in the bedroom doorway and see nothing, and would know that he had lost a second friend, not to the ocean this time but to that other bottomless sea called madness. He struggled for the courage not to close his eyes.
He let himself be dragged down the hallway, and when he saw Augie Silver propped on pillows, his white beard billowing forth like foam, he did the pure and necessary thing. He fell to his knees with his chest across the returned man's bed and wept against the back of his bony hand. His tears left dark streaks on the sun-scorched skin that was white-coated with a powdery dryness. The parrot looked on and did a slow dance on its perch.
"I pray for you," Reuben said through his weeping. "I don't like to pray, I don't believe, but I pray for you, then I feel like I believe enough to feel bad I don't believe, so I shouldn't pray. But I pray for you, Meester Silber. I do."
Augie put his hand on the young man's dark hair. "You're a pal, Reuben. You're really a pal."